


ASSET 61137

by hikaie



Series: 31 Days of Apex [5]
Category: Apex Legends (Video Games), Titanfall (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Established Relationship, F/F, One Shot, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25320637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikaie/pseuds/hikaie
Summary: the depths of a dark place, or,Renee struggles with the reality of who, and what, she is.
Relationships: Wattson | Natalie Paquette/Wraith | Renee Blasey
Series: 31 Days of Apex [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1821931
Kudos: 33





	ASSET 61137

**Author's Note:**

> Okay tags are weird sometimes so: T rating just for mentions of genocide/war/medical experimentation/etc. Just that good ol' fun canon stuff. Titanfall added as well because this relies kind of heavily upon... that... so if you're not familiar with the plot I'm sorry! It's worth it though, I promise! General warnings for depression/trauma/PTSD/what-have-you, and the way people around the character also deal with it. I have a lot of feelings about Wraith. Let's talk about her more.
> 
> Can be considered within the same verse as [head of household](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25231237), but is not a direct continuation of same, and can be read independent of it.
> 
> Happier ending, not heavy on the romance but it's there. Enjoy.
> 
> **Days 9 & 10: Weapon; Truth**

If she holds her arm at the right angle, if she finds her eyes straying when Natalie is smiling up at her, their skin inches apart, she finds that their scars are eerily similar. The branching shapes are familiar, but where Natalie’s scars have faded with time, the shadow of the shock that left them, Renee’s are an ugly, abused purple. There are time where they still hurt, times where opening a portal does more harm than good and the tendril-like scarring will inch down her forearm.

She wears long sleeves to bed, often.

Natalie does not touch. Ajay does, if she needs to. Elliott, too, but he’s careful about it, and doesn’t push his luck. She appreciates it. Sometimes she cannot stop herself from tracing the ridges of scar tissue, thoughtless passes of her fingers until the skin feels raw and her nerves exposed.

There are days when the why is too much. There is only one voice in her head to speak of the past, and it’s louder than all the rest combined, at times. Anita spits at the mention of the hero of Harmony, and Elliott rolls his eyes, but Renee feels something much deeper. She’d been an adolescent on Gridiron in those days, only remembers receiving the news of Typhon delayed by months. How could she know in less than a decade they would be connected, this thin thread of fate spanning across years and dimensions? Whatever else he had done, his discarding of the faulty device at the old ARES facility had paved the way for her.

She thinks she hates him. For a while, she fools herself into feeling the contempt Anita feels.

“Before my time.” Natalie says over dinner one evening, and Renee doesn’t remember how the subject came up. She’s smiling. “Papa always said it was the turning point of the war. Did you know we have a Pilot Cooper Day?”

“Yeah.” She says, mouth dry, thinking of the times over the six years she’s spent on Solace watching the public wildly rejoice, one day a year. The Syndicate has never recognized the holiday, but that never stopped the people.

_Why_ does she hate him? Hadn’t it been her choice, to become an experiment? And before that… she’d _done_ the experimenting. She can’t remember the gaps between her distant, fuzzy childhood and those painful, frightening weeks as Singh’s lab rat. She thinks she knows who she is _now_ , and that person shouldn’t harbor any hatred for Jack Cooper, a man in the wrong place at the right time. He hadn’t even made the device- he’d just used it, up until it served its purpose.

That was how the Militia differed. They developed the bracelet for a reason- to unravel the ARES Division’s temporal anomaly and stop a mass genocide of their own people. There was no undoing what the IMC had already done to its own people. And then… they bastardized the tech, she and Singh, and here was their result: one broken weapon, displaced in time and space.

She’s jealous, then- of a man in the past, in another dimension, who had a choice; who used the tool instead of becoming it. He had been a nobody amongst the ranks who became something through will and merit, completely by accident. He didn’t _want_ it. She was the one who tried for it, and look where she ended up.

“Renee?” Her girlfriend’s voice is small and far away, and Renee finds herself curled up on the couch in her study, and knows she’s lost time again.

“Huh?”

“You’ve been in here awhile.” Natalie touches her forehead, pushing her hair out of her eyes. Renee exhales slowly.

“It’s quiet.” She murmurs, the truth. And it never gets cold. She hates the cold, the way it puts her back in the lab, against the table.

“Yes.” Natalie agrees with a smile while she’s crouched down by the couch. She’s made the room her own over the past few months; it is still overrun with books, and her father’s beautiful wooden desk, but there’s always an underlying smell of oil and burnt wires. “Should I call anyone?”

Natalie is lovely, but Renee knows how overwhelming she can be at times. Path has come over, before, when she doesn’t remember her own strength. Elliott, too, when she’s deep in her head. He has a way with getting her out of there, just talks and talks and doesn’t expect reciprocity. She asked him, once, with her head laying on his thigh, if this was how he spoke with his mom, and he had gone quiet momentarily and she had felt _guilty, guilty, guilty_ but he had just said _yes_ and barreled into the next topic, and she had felt grateful and pitiful.

“No.” Renee turns her face into the cushion. It’s rough, she actually hates the texture but Natalie likes it, and Renee’s the interloper here. Her partner pets over her hair a few moments longer, but then her hand goes, and Renee listens to her pad across the floor and sit in the creaky desk chair.

This is okay. This is more than enough for someone like her.

They all know. Why is that the worst part? Why is it not the pain, the guilt, nor the shame? Why does it hurt more that Octavio had busted through that door in Labs after dropping them there? Then he had pressed the button entirely on accident when he’d tripped and landed on the keyboard. She’d already been full of an unexplained dread, the voices a dull scream, but they’d stopped when her own voice emanated from the dust-choked speakers.

Their warnings were for naught. She was on the path, now. Octavio had lain on the floor and listened, and Elliott had come around the corner, Wingman raised, slowly falling when that new voice ended up being familiar. His eyes- she doesn’t like to remember. After that, it didn’t take long for word to get out.

How close had she come to losing everything, _everyone_ , that mattered? It had been foolish, to get herself so involved with _other people_ when she still hadn’t remembered everything with any kind of clarity. While she’d never worried about Pathfinder, as entirely unconcerned with human folly as he was, she’d felt suffocated by fear of what Elliott and Natalie might do- what they thought. At the time the other woman had still been lead engineer, but it was juicy gossip, made the rounds frighteningly fast.

She was ashamed when she thought of how she hid. There were too many questions, her head was splitting, and she couldn’t stand to look anyone in the eye. She holed up in her apartment in the dark, missing God knew how many matches. It should have been relief she felt, when Elliott came looking. And she did a good job of pasting on a smile, of pushing the detritus of her depression under the couch, out of sight, asking him in and offering him something to drink. In return, he’d faked it right back, that patent Witt smile and charm, edging too close into being Mirage. That’s what really got her; that’s what sowed the lasting anguish into her stomach, which she still nursed from time to time.

Things had gotten better. Their world was ever-changing. That was the thing about war, wasn’t it? There were no clean breaks. The Outlands recovered in fits and starts, and they all played a dangerous game together. Maybe he forgot, or maybe he had more important things on his mind, but over time, his smiles became warm again, became genuine. After her father’s death, Natalie had become distant herself, until they’d finally come together just months ago in what they were dancing around for _so long_. Renee should be happy, and usually, she is.

It was _enough_. It was so much more than enough, perfect, more than she deserved.

“ _Mon ange_ , I’m going to order takeaway, okay?”

Renee surfaces from her thoughts to nod into the cushion, and Natalie hums her way out of the study and down the hall. Renee listens to her raise a restaurant on the holophone, and smiles despite herself when her girlfriend asks for the extra spicy curry, knowing it’s for her. She tugs her sleeves down her arms and stretches, curling her shoulders in until they almost hurt, and turns her face to look over at Natalie’s desk. A little curl of smoke is still dissipating, and the familiar smell of electric components grounds her to the moment. The phone call in the kitchen ends, and Natalie comes back down the hallway, pausing in the doorway to smile softly at her.

“There you are. Feeling better?”

“Kind of.” Her voice is rough from disuse.

“I ordered you the curry you like. It should only be a half hour.” Natalie bends over to press a kiss to her cheek, her hair falling into her face and making Renee scrunch her nose.

“I know, I heard you.”

“ _Merde_.” She says, without heat, and then Renee huffs when the other woman joins her on the couch.

“Hi.”

“Hello.” Then she pauses, and Renee feels that familiar emotion start to stir in her stomach, like vines threatening to overcome her and burst forth. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah.” Renee reaches up to cup her cheek, and her sleeve slips a little, revealing the lighter scar tissue curled around her wrist. She looks instead to the Lichtenberg figure on Natalie’s face, all those branching paths as familiar to her as her own scars. She lifts her other hand, to touch the scar that curls under Natalie’s eye, and marvels at her luck to be able to do this. Back then… back when she’d stared herself in the face, and felt the yawning chasm of difference between them, the strength she lacked, she could have said no. She could have died, and never had this.

“Nat?” She says, softly, feels the muscles under her hands jump when Natalie hums in response. “I love you.”

Her girlfriend smiles. “I love you too, _mon ange_.”

And after all, she doesn’t hate Jack Cooper. In this moment, maybe she’s even _grateful_. Maybe she owes him. Maybe this was always the path, and that singular voice louder than the rest always knew better. Or maybe this one perfect thing was her choice, and hers alone.


End file.
